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Got it pretty much done. Turned out pretty good I think.
I'm just kidding. These are from my trip to the BMW Museum in Munich. It was full of everything BMW and was all finished to the most perfect of levels.
So where I am actually at is that I have gotten more of the trim delete closer to being done.
I got my paint in for down the road. I am still debating about trying to tackle it myself or to try and have someone do it for me. I got the single stage 22 Line from Glasurit in Riviera Blue.
While working on the body work up on the front I noticed that the front nose was a bit loose near the bottom and had noticed that the prior owner had it swapped at some point. The tabs on the bottom were cut to remove the old one but the new nose never was welded on down there. I found a few sheet metal screws and decided to pop it and clean it up. I ground off the old tabs and straightened the sheet metal out then proceeded to weld it back together. I was going to try to do spot welds to keep it more factory but my spot welder would not get into the locations. I also straightened up the lower lip and got rid of all the bent portions. Kinda looks like a boat with no tires on.
As you can see it had minimal welding done down the sides and other than the few spot welds the sheetmetal screw on each end were about all that was holding it on.
These are the old tabs and the new one wasn't even welded down here.
The final fit after getting it welded up seems to be pretty good.
I dropped the front suspension and went through the steering box. I think I got lucky and other than a bit of rust on the shaft which cleaned up fine I didn't notice any pitting on the gears. I used the iemotorsport steering box refresher kit and swapped all the seals and changed the oil.
Dropped the front subframe and got it into the sand blaster.
Welded in the reinforcement plate and painted it all up. I'd like you to all note my awesome welding skills.
Parts apart.
I opted to reuse the control arms because they looked pretty good.
Assembled but only temporarily because I had fresh hardware in the mail but was leaving for a trip.
Got my hardware to swap in. Got it at http://wallothnesch.com
Here it is with the new hardware installed.
I then proceeded to drop the rear and that is in progress for a rebuild.
Found a bit more rust that I will have to work on.
I think these are the US bumper mounts welded into the European mounts. I was contemplating cutting the US stuff out but think I may just leave it in there. Has anyone attempted to modify them back?

I spent some more time trying to remove some of the paint and extra trim. The wire brush method was working well but it is still quite a bit of effort to handle. I tried some paint stripper which worked well on getting the paint up fast but it only worked on one layer and didn't get the bondo. I found depending on the area that there are at least 4 different paint jobs on this car from various prior owners. So I switched back to the wire brush grinder.
To take a bit of a break from all of the grinding I started working on closing up some of the extra holes. I like the cleaner look with the lower trim removed so I welded those all up. I want to remove the front bumper and am debating going bare or adding an air dam. I plan on converting to the Euro bumpers on the rear so I started closing up the holes for that along with the US reflector mount points.
I cleaned out the interior sound deadening in preparation for a fresh start. The prior owner installed a sound system and cut holes in the rear window tray as well as under the rear seat so I closed those up as well.
I removed the transmission, driveshaft, axles and differential. I got a hold of a LSD that will be going in and am working on tracking down a 5 speed Getrag 245. It's nice working under the car when it's all clean. Hopefully I can keep it that way over the years.
There was a small rusted area in the passenger footwell that I cut out and tried reforming the shape as best as I could and welded in the patch panel.

I had a decent size dent in the front driver side fender. Did some bodywork to get it straight again. Used a combination of hammers, blandishing hammer, English wheel and torch heating to get it to come back together. There is still a bit more to do on it but it's pretty close.
The tree that fell onto the roof knocked a pretty good dent into it but that is also coming out pretty well. I removed the support bars and pounded the roof back up as best as I could then started working on bent areas using hammers, torch and a vibrating friction disc. Still have to weld back in the supports and hopefully get it a bit smoother.
I had a rust spot in the rear passenger side fender. I dug out some of the weaker material and put a metal etch on it to help get rid of most of the rust. Then formed a piece of sheet metal and worked it in behind the area and welded it up. Still have a bit more to do on that but it came out pretty well so far.
I don't have a prior photo but the front window frame had a similar size rust spot that I fixed in a similar manner to the fender.
Finished removing the rest of the interior and dash. I have a few small cracks starting to develop and hopefully i can get them repaired before they get too noticeable.

So I started a build thread a while back. It's here... Old Build
I've had a chance to start working on it again and hopefully will be getting it finished this time.
Pulling back more paint and clearing out the interior.